Black in Blue by Carmen Best

Author:Carmen Best
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harpercollins Leadership
Published: 2021-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2020

They say that when it rains, it pours, right? Well, it must be true, because around the same day as the mass shooting in Seattle, Washington State reported its first confirmed case of coronavirus. To make things worse, it was the first confirmed case in the whole country. Suddenly, the state I called home was ground zero. We already had the eyes of the world on us because of the recent gun violence. Now we were making headlines because of this scary virus that had been claiming many victims over the past month in Asia. To say that people were afraid would be an understatement. We were terrified! What was this virus? What were the symptoms? Who was most at risk? What precautions were we supposed to take? So many questions, yet no answers. And we had no time to sit and think either. Roughly a month after the first case in the state, Seattle reported its first community-transmitted case in the city. It was time to act.

We knew that we would probably be considered essential workers, but people didn’t want to go out. What did it mean for the health of the officers? Who had preexisting or compromised health conditions? And what about the protective equipment? If we had a COVID-positive employee—which we did—what was expected of us? Were they to be quarantined? Were they to be isolated? How long did they isolate for? How long did they quarantine for? How did we test? None of that had been established yet.

Fortunately for us, city employees stepped up. They set up the Emergency Operations Center—from which all of the various city departments and their responses were managed. They were also coordinating with Dr. Jeffrey Duchin—an epidemiology expert—and other public health doctors, spokespersons, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization, pulling together all the necessary information so that we could have an appropriate response. Yes, we had previously dealt with other dangerous viruses, like H1N1. But COVID-19 was a whole other beast.

One of the first things we were instructed to do was to outfit all of our officers with personal protective equipment (PPE). As instructions were provided, we noticed that there was conflicting information coming from the health department and the CDC—they weren’t always in sync. More questions were raised on the verbiage and definitions related to the virus and our response: Who was considered to be an essential worker? What were the rules about social distancing? Once we were told that we had to be within six feet of one another for more than ten minutes for it to be considered an exposure, we had even more doubts about definitions and measures: What was an exposure? Was it an incident? What were we protecting for? How would we monitor?

The government relied on the REDCap system, which had been created at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2004, and was used to support a small number of clinical researchers who needed to collect data in safety and in compliance with patient privacy laws.

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